


Capacity

by theclockiscomplete



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-12 22:24:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3357485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclockiscomplete/pseuds/theclockiscomplete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara comes into contact with just enough of a hallucinogenic lipstick print to cause her to see what she wants to, and what she really wants to see is Danny.Unfortunately, Danny is not the man aboard the TARDIS and the Doctor must navigate the balance between impostor and friend as Clara seeks closure. Little bit of angst, little bit of fluff, and whouffaldi at the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Capacity

**Author's Note:**

> So this just started out as 12 and Clara bickering over a mysterious lipstick print and kind of...(d)evolved from there. I had fun writing it, and all thanks to ao3 author and friend fhestia for working out continuity kinks. If you're in the market for hilarious and angsty whouffaldi hurt/comfort, she's got the goods. Anyway, thanks for reading and happy Rabid Heteronormativity day.

“I’m just saying that if one of us was going to get lipstick all over everything, it wouldn’t be me!”

Clara sighed and crossed her arms. “And I’m saying that I don’t own lipstick in that color. For Pete’s sake, it’s _gold_. I’m not that ostentatious.” The Doctor arched an eyebrow and Clara felt the muscles in her shoulders bristle. “Alright then, you arse. There’s no telling how long it’s been since you’ve seen me—for all I know, you went to the planet of lipstick and are too embarrassed to admit to the evidence. God knows you wouldn’t know how to seduce anyone to come aboard!” This time there was a smile. “Stop it,” she warned. “I don’t want to hear about how ridiculous a planet of lipstick sounds. Not after the sequin planet. You don’t get—”

  
“Clara,” he interrupted with that infuriating half-grin still on his face. His long and weathered fingers turned the bottle’s label towards her. “I’m allergic to grapes.” Clara blinked. Right. She’d forgotten that. Despite the reaction he’d had last month. “And for your information,” he continued, all mock offense and waving arms, “there are plenty of pudding-brains who would kill for a chance to travel with me, and I imagine they’d be a lot easier to manage.” There was a long silence in which only the thrumming of the ship around them could be heard, a silence in which the Time Lord and his companion stared at each other and refused to back down.

  
“It isn’t mine,” she said.

  
“Nor mine.”

  
“You’re implying you have other colors of lipstick?”

 

“Clara, I am a man of many secrets and talents. Occasionally there are some-”

  
“That require cross-dressing?”

  
He nodded, Clara noticed, with only the faintest of blushes. “My point is,” he said, turning the bottle over in his hands, “that if this doesn’t belong to you, there’s only one other person I know with lipstick this color.”

  
“So you have had someone else aboard since you’ve been away.”

  
“I never said that.” He lifted the bottle and shook it with a slight smile. “I’m going to put it in the cabinet, but you are not allowed to drink it. Got it?”

  
Clara frowned. “Then why are you keeping it?”

  
The Doctor waved his free hand as he turned towards the kitchen. “The colors look good together. It can be a decoration later. Maybe my next face will like purple and gold.”

  
Clara followed him. “It’s a bottle of grape juice, Doctor. You can’t just leave it out.” She leaned against the sink and crossed her arms. “If I didn’t know you better I’d accuse you of a wine habit.” The Doctor glanced down at her, and then moved the bottle up a shelf, standing on his tiptoes.

  
“Much longer with you and I might develop one.” Clara resisted the urge to kick him.

  
“Putting it on a top shelf isn’t going to stop me,” she pointed out. The Doctor considered.

  
“Quite right. Alright, it’s poison. That should keep you out of it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve obviously got a transporter cable to fix. Whoever that bottle belonged to has just been robbed of a very nice drink—er, poison—in their timeline.” He swished past Clara with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. Clara looked at the ceiling and waited until his footsteps had faded, then hoisted herself up onto the counter and opened the cabinet.

Even with the extra height, her fingers could just brush the front of the smooth bottle. She looked down around her feet, and her eyes fell on the glass vase of baking utensils. The Doctor didn’t understand why she insisted on working to make her food when they had a machine with a ridiculous name to do it for them, but he never complained about the soufflés and treats she brought for him to try. Not once they were in his mouth, anyway. Usually. She nudged the bottle towards her and was finally able to grasp it and bring it down to her. Clara peeked around the corner before studying the bottle more closely. Near as she could tell, it was just a kind of grape juice she hadn’t seen before.

She sniffed the contents—still smelled like grape juice—and took a cautious sip, careful to keep her mouth away from the lipstick print. A sweet, dark flavor flooded her tongue, unmistakably that of processed grapes. “What an arse,” she muttered, disappointed. She prodded the lipstick print, wondering who it could have belonged to. A little bit stuck to her finger, and she rubbed it out against her thumb until the shimmer faded. “Strong stuff,” she mused, and then frowned and shook her hand. “And warm. Must be some kind of temperature-controlled future makeup.”

She reached up and set the bottle on the top shelf and pushed it back with the spatula, then hopped down from the cabinet and smoothed her skirt. Her hand felt tingly and nice from her fingertips nearly to her elbow, and she clenched and relaxed a fist. It was then that she noticed the cat winding around the leg of one of the chairs. She blinked. “Hullo.” The cat regarded her with eyes a color that Clara couldn’t quite fathom, and then trotted out of the room. Arm forgotten, Clara grinned and followed it.

**********

  
If he was being honest, he didn't understand why he didn't simply tell Clara that the bottle belonged to River. He'd told her about his wife; that wasn't the issue. He didn't feel particularly possessive of her memory, especially not with Clara. After several contemplative moments, he sighed and accepted that maybe, just maybe, he had folded and indulged in bantering. There was a possibility, however small, that he had just been jerking Clara's chain to watch her squirm. In his defense, it was hilarious. He was smiling as he worked on the wires that had crossed and transported River's drink to his timeline. It wouldn't do to have artifacts from his timestream popping up all over the place. Anything could turn up.

It was right about then that he heard Clara calling for a cat. He paused in his tinkering and looked down past his feet. She appeared in the doorway to the console room, bowed at the waist with her hand extended, calling "kitty kitty" with intense concentration. Concerned, the Doctor watched her advance on empty air before sighing in frustration and apparently following whatever she was seeing. "Clara," he called. She waved him down, a "shush" gesture.

  
"Not now, Danny." The Doctor blinked and opened his mouth, and then shut it with an audible click as he realized what was going on. He sat straight up and banged his head on the console's underside. He started to swear, and Clara fixed him with what would have been a withering glare were it not for how huge and unfocused her pupils were. The Doctor checked his hand for blood and sat up more slowly, checking once more for any sign of an actual cat before resigning himself to the fact that his best friend was on a hallucinogenic trip and it was entirely his fault. He purposefully scuffed a shoe against the floor, and Clara sighed and straightened up. When she looked at him, it was with such a mixture of affection and annoyance that the Doctor took a full second to sort out what the look meant. "You scared him off, you big lump."

"Yes, sorry about that. Clara, I need you to listen--" she grabbed him by the wrist and tugged him down a hall before he could finish.

"Come on, come on," she said. "I've got loads of marking that I need help with and I haven't talked to you in ages. The Doctor stopped just short of blurting the reason for that, recognizing at the last second that an abrupt "Danny is dead" was useless at best and traumatizing at worst. Depending on how much of the lipstick she came in contact with-- and there wasn't much to begin with-- it would be a bit over an hour before she was back to herself. A whole hour. In the right order. While she thought he was Danny. The worst part? River would be laughing planets out of the sky if she could see this.

  
"Alright," he sighed. "Let's take a look at the marking." He nearly flinched out of his hoodie when Clara stood on her tiptoes and pecked him on the lips before he even had to time to anticipate or dodge. When she turned and hauled him along, he rubbed his free hand furiously over his lips. Just in case.

  
He had thought Clara was talkative as it was. But half an hour into the marking, which he'd given Clara an inkless pen to do in order to spare her the embarrassment of clumsily-scrawled comments like "brilliantly worded description of Erebos Tek IV!" etched in permanent red, he was beginning to seriously contemplate if she had evolved beyond the need for air in her lungs. He had already ruled out putting her to sleep until the lipstick wore off—there was no telling what she would dream about, and removing even more of the limited control she had over her body could prove disastrous if she had a nightmare. He was halfway through a mental recitation of the periodic table—the galactic standard one, not the laughably short, incomplete list compiled by Earth scientists—when he realized she’d asked him a question. “Sorry?” he asked.

  
“I asked where you’ve been for the last six months. I missed you.”

  
The Doctor groped desperately for a response. Her memory loss baffled and concerned him; hallucinations were normal, but there was no reason that she should have forgotten what had happened to her boyfriend. “Ah…you know. Around…” was the lame answer that came out. Time Lord ingenuity at its finest.

  
To his utter shock, Clara nodded and said, “I imagine you had lots of people to catch up with before you made it..back here. To the living.” She chanced a glance at him and interpreted his expression incorrectly. “I’m not blaming you,” she added quickly. “It’s just…I was starting to think that only the Doctor got to see ghosts. And I really, really missed you.”

  
The Doctor finally understood what was going on and what part she needed him to play. He could not pretend to be Danny; when her hallucination faded she would never forgive him if she thought he’d taken advantage of her altered state. But neither could he be himself. He had to give just enough dialogue to keep her happy, and it had to be carefully neutral. “I missed you too,” he said. It seemed safe enough, and certainly true enough, and he was rewarded with a bright smile that made him feel only slightly guilty for being the wrong recipient of it. “Just wondering,” he added, “where are we?” The question was partly a bid for time and partly a diagnostic one—he wasn’t sure how skewed Clara’s perception of reality was, and he needed to be sure if he was going to keep this neutral for the next half hour or so.

  
“Oh,” Clara said, and laughed. “This is my room on the TARDIS. I guess you’ve never seen it before. Here, have a look. I’ve got this shelf…” And so the Doctor was led on a tour of his companion’s room, provided for the first time with her honest opinion of its decorating and functionality. He learned that she had been lying—he knew it!—when she said that she didn’t mind the purple walls, and that the holo screen on the ceiling was just a tad too big for her to fully appreciate it. He kept a mental list going of her likes and dislikes, helpfully parenthesizing his opinions of them so that he wouldn’t accidentally blurt them out later when he made good on the changes. After her rundown of the items in her room, she sat down on her bed and grinned up at him. He noted that her pupils were narrower, though not yet back to normal. “Danny?” The Doctor hummed a response, blinking as Clara reached out for his hand. “How much time have you got left?” She pulled him down to sit next to her on the edge of the bed. The Doctor made a quick calculation.

  
“Probably about five minutes. Perhaps a little less.”

  
Clara rested their joined hands on her thigh and looked up at him. “I’ve got to ask you something,” she said. He played it safe and gave her an expectant look and a small smile. “Is this okay with you? That I stay with the Doctor now? Or do you think I’m a coward for leaving my life behind?” The Doctor felt his hearts stammer. If he said the wrong thing now, he’d be the worst kind of impostor. But not answering was not an option. He thought hard to find an answer that he and Danny would agree on.

  
“I have never thought you a coward,” he said carefully. “And your happiness is all that I have ever desired.” Clara smiled up at him. Her eyes, he saw, were almost back to normal.

  
“He has my heart,” she said softly, and before The Doctor could fathom what she was doing, she was astride his lap, kissing him with his lapels in her grip. He froze.  
  
“Clara, I—” His companion placed a finger on his lips and he realized with a start that her eyes were full of tears.

  
“Please,” she said. “I need this.” He hesitated, his tongue probing gently at the lip that had just been captured between hers. She placed a hand on his cheek and he met her eyes. “Doctor,” she said, and he melted. Her mouth tasted of the salt coming from her eyes, and he reached a tender thumb up to swipe gently under her eyelids. He rubbed his other thumb along the hipbone covered by her skirt as Clara’s tongue touched his lip, seeking permission he could never have denied her. Her fingers tugged at his hair and the groan the pressure elicited reverberated through them in a register closer to a growl. All too soon, they broke apart for air, drinking each other in with their eyes. The Doctor leaned his forehead against hers, his breathing uneven.

  
“What are the chances we’re both hallucinating?”

  
“I’d have to say zero,” Clara said with a chuckle, and wiggled her lipstick-free fingers. The Doctor felt a surge of pride as he took in the red, wet lips inches from his own. He kissed them once, chastely, and Clara burrowed against him, her head on his shoulder and breath ghosting across his collarbone.

  
“Clara,” the Doctor began. Her hand groped for his face and covered his mouth.

  
“I have wanted this for just as long as you,” she mumbled. “Don’t go complicatin’ things. ‘M happy.” He smiled against her palm, and she moved it to his other shoulder.  
  
“I am too,” he said. “Happier than I ever imagined.”

  
“Imagined it often, did you?”

  
“Clara Oswald, you have no idea.” He held her close and laid back on the bed, her head on his chest as he smiled up at the galaxy above them. “You miss him,” he said a moment later—not an accusation, but an observation.

  
“I do,” she said. “He deserved more from me. He deserved the truth—that he was a great man who kept me grounded to Earth, but that grounding wasn’t what I was looking for.” Her small, slender fingers threaded through his.

  
“How long did you know it was me?” He felt her smile against his chest and hazarded the guess that it was one of those sad smiles.

  
“You said my happiness was all you desired,” she said. “Danny prioritized my safety. Happiness came second, though”— she yawned and tangled a leg in his—“he did his best.” He didn’t answer, and she sat up to look at him. “Oi.” She tapped his shoulder with a closed fist. “That wasn’t a criticism. I’d rather be happy than safe any day.”

  
He shook his head. “It isn’t that. It’s just…the woman who owned that lipstick. I valued her safety over her happiness, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Time can be rewritten, but she…she wouldn’t let me.”

  
“You’re talking about River.” The Doctor nodded, running his fingers through the fine hair at her temples.

  
“I knew it was hers even before your hallucinations started.”

  
Clara giggled. “I would hope so. It’s hardly a color you could forget. But why didn’t you tell me?”

  
“I was…bantering,” the Doctor admitted. He gently tugged a lock of hair at his companion’s expression of mock surprise. “A moment of weakness, I know. But I couldn’t help jerking your chain a little. Wherever she is,” he waved an arm in emphasis, “River’s laughing fit to kill.” It seemed surprisingly natural for the two of them to be conversing about loved ones they’d lost, devoid of hurt of jealousy and secure in each other’s affections.

  
“Daft old man.” The warmth in Clara’s smile caused him to grin in spite of himself. She kissed his brow. He caught her cheek in a weathered palm and breathed in the scent of the dark hair tickling his face. She maneuvered so that her arms supported her weight and the rest of her was flush with the Doctor’s body. When she spoke, she stared in wonder at the pulse in his throat, beating a rhythm she wanted to know better. “We can love an infinite amount of people in our lifetimes,” she whispered, “but never two in the same way.” Clara met his gaze, and the jeweled galaxies reflected deep in the Doctor’s eyes threatened to draw her in indefinitely. He made a move to roll them over, but Clara caught his arm and held him down with mischief in her smile. He desisted immediately and collapsed back onto the pillows, and Clara followed to catch his lips with hers. And as he closed his eyes and poured his hearts out to the woman who’d held them since their eyes had first met, the thin shred of rational thought he had left shouted praises to whomever was responsible for the limitless capacity the three joined hearts shared for love.


End file.
